Family and Kinship (Sociology)

Kinship is defined through your descent group/ people who you are related to. In the film, Dadi’s family is shown to be related through an affine kinship. The relationships that are discussed in the film are all based on marriage. Dada, Dadi, the sons and her daughters-in-law are part of the family through marriage. The family is patrilocal extended family.

A family consists of a group of interacting individuals related by blood, marriage, cohabitation, or adoption who interdependently perform relevant functions by fulfilling expected roles. (Edelman, Kudzma, & Mandle, 2014, p. 150)

l. Kinship: people who are related by blood, marriage, or adoption or who consider on another family

The Kin group is a social group formed on the basis of recognized. A group of people who culturally view themselves as relatives, cooperate in certain activities, and share a sense of identity as kinfolk. For example, Incest Taboo is any cultural rule or norm that prohibits sexual relations between closely related persons. Nearly every society prohibits sex and marriage between nuclear family members, except in three documented cases: Ancient Hawaiians, prehistoric Incans, and Egypt Allowed only to preserve the royal family purity and bloodlines. These ancient Hawaiian, prehistoric Incans and Egypt allow sex and marriage between nuclear family members because of their ancient beliefs of passing down your gene are like their root for them. That is why they let the family have sex with each other just to pass down their genes, root, culture, and

Bilateral- (biological kin) both mom and dad kin are related equally to children. Names—ppl have same name as a kin relation, will also be treated as family. Names come from ancestors.

Men and women have different views on kinship. Tiv men think that blood is thicker than water. “Here people looked for little in marriage. A man would turn to his sixteenth cousin twice removed before he turned to his wife. Here the important ties were between blood relatives” (122). However, women viewed kinship to be through relationships. In her time with the Tivs, Bowmen was given the kinship title of mother. “You feed Ihugh, therefore you are his mother.” Udama corrected me firmly but quite patiently now that she saw I meant no insult. “Listen, Redwoman, if a woman dies, do her children become motherless? Is not the woman who feeds them and cares for them their mother? Therefore these are not merely matters of birth. They are matters of deed as well.” . . . I wrestled with the implications of this dual aspect of kinship, by birth and by deed (118).

It is the bond I share with an individual who cares the most for me. Today many people I associate with consider family to be people from their bloodline. I consider it as the bonds you share with those who care the most for a person.

The process of relation is a way in that the Kayapo strengthen and solidify village co-existence. Often times, Kayapo members of the same village identify each other as kin. Designation of kin is contextual, because it does little to describe the experience of the Kayapo involving their relations and interactions with each other. Their idea of kinship is so different from the American way, which makes it difficult to understand what makes a person kin without that specified blood relation. Due to this, it is very hard to create genealogies for Kayapo

We often only refer to direct family as their traditional terms such as ‘mother’, ‘father’, ‘aunt’, ‘uncle’ and so on as European’s but within the Indigenous kinship, family is more involved and expanded so what is to European’s an ‘Aunt’ is ‘Mother’ under kinship classification or ‘Uncle’ as ‘Father’. However, these only apply to same-sex siblings of the parents so a sister of the father would simply remain as an aunt.

Lucinda Ramberg has reignite the kinship studies through Given to the Goddess which had declined and got less attention from anthropologists in the last two decades. Kinship as a subdiscipline became increasingly marginal to anthropology partly because its debate had been removed from the actual lived experiences of kinship (Carsten, 2013). They often failed to apprehend what made kinship such an important aspect of the experiences of those whose lives were being described. Furthermore, as Ramberg indicates in her book, “anthropological accounts of kinship have all centered their analyses of human relatedness on the conjugal pair” (12) and excluded other categories which do not follow this assumption.

The value of kinship, or family relations is slowly but still relevantly decreasing over the years. I have a unique perspective of this situation due to the fact that I’ve experienced both the ‘American’ and ‘Indian’ culture. This gives me more room to compare and contrast between the cultures to identify the major changes and the effects of those changes. One major different I notice is that, according to the “Kingship Interview” activity we did in class, it showed that it’s less likely that kin terms are used when describing close relatives that are both older than you or the near the same age as you, like family friends or even neighbors. In my culture, it’s rare to find people using first names to call upon others, rather kin terms such as “Bhai (Brother), Kaka (Uncle), Kaki (Aunt)” even if they share no biological relation with you.

The Nuer are patrilineal, but people are considered to be related equally to their kin through both the mother's and the father's sides. Thus, descent can be best described as cognatic. The Nuer consider kinship the most important basis of social organization. People determine whether they are related by their clan names. The members of a clan share a totem and believe in their descent from that totem. It is also on the basis of clan membership that strong marriage or sexual prohibitions are established and enforced.

The author in After Kinship argues that anthropologists should adopt new ways to study kinship since the innovative practices are both raising new concerns and challenging our old understandings. Anthropologists perceive kinship as non-western phenomena which is strongly intertwined with political and societal structures in which the boundaries between “rule of law” and “rule of nature” are blurred. On the contrary, kinship is believed to be obsolete in the West and reduced to the notion of nuclear family, which is on its part deprived of from any political and societal functions. Family is perceived as separate, domestic and private and rather natural than cultural.

In chapter five: “Patterns of Kinship and Residence” the book Families in Global and Multicultural Perspective by Max E. Stanston, he goes through the concept of Kin and how the affiliation affects an average person. Starting the reading of the content made perfect sense and seems to be a simple enough concept to understand. I could relate to the points at first, but after reading in further it covered wider grounds on the simple concept of “kin” and how different society interpreted it. Also, the discussion of residence was mentioned later on in the chapter. The notion has a wide variety of rules varying from culture to culture. It’s interesting to see how kinship and residence comes in so many different forms some that I could relate to and a few that are new concept I hadn’t even thought

Kinship is the institution that resolves the issue of reproduction (until the population gets large). As stated previously, a society needs to reproduce biologically, social structurally and culturally. The explanation that Turner provides for kinship is that it allows “marriage and blood ties organized into structures and mediated by